


Wherefore Art Thou Cantankerous Bastard

by shecrows



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-08
Updated: 2012-01-08
Packaged: 2017-10-29 04:05:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/315610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shecrows/pseuds/shecrows
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>aka my big, gay love letter to Jim and Bones. As I explained to someone, somewhere: "i was desperate to hack up these feelings in a kind of words-facilitated exorcism, so this happened. meta masquerading as a blowjob, good times."</p>
<p>sequel to Not A Big Deal (TM). Read on <a href="http://shecrows.livejournal.com/672010.html#cutid1">livejournal</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wherefore Art Thou Cantankerous Bastard

Jim knows that, despite being a genius, he can be kind of a complete idiot.

Don’t get him wrong: he  _knows_ people. He knows how to work them, mostly, knows how to get a read on them almost immediately, just enough of one that he can figure out how to get them to do what he wants when he knows what that is. It’s not about figuring out how they’re wired so much as the general instrument of the thing and what they’re capable of, what they can do and where they’d be best doing it. It’s probably part of what makes him a really great captain.

Apparently it also makes him a pretty shitty friend.

Or whatever – not that Bones will stay in a room with him long enough to tell him what he did.

Scratch that, Jim knows what he did. And yeah, he knew what he was likely to get in terms of an immediate reaction, that’s why he did it, because it was hilarious, but the silent avoidance treatment is so not even remotely amusing anymore.

Jim was willing to let it slide for the first day or two, because fine, sometimes Bones just gets like that, and Jim doesn’t actually have to push all the time. He can totally back off and give Bones space, or whatever, time to fashion a dartboard out of Jim’s face and let off some steam even though Jim still doesn’t fully understand what there is to be so goddamn angry about. It was a  _joke,_  and yeah, Bones is a little manic about privacy, and so maybe the entire crew thinks they’re fucking on a regular basis, but it’s not like it’s true, not like it’s an actual real secret Jim has just flagrantly and gleefully exposed to the entire bridge. Jim’s not a total asshole, and he’s not sure he’d be even remotely capable of doing that to Bones.

Jim knows his hang-ups. He’s got several. After five years, he’s starting to know Bones’s, too. He’s not an easy guy, neither of them are, and they’ve butted heads so often Jim’s got a permanent bruise on his skull he likes to call Wherefore Art Thou Cantankerous Bastard, but their arguments usually blow over as quickly and completely as they come up, and even when they’re yelling themselves hoarse in each other’s faces, they’re never more than a room’s length apart.

It’s been five days – which doesn’t seem like a whole lot, in the grand scheme of things, but Jim isn’t in the mood to give a shit. It’s been five days of trawling through Delta Quadrant, which Jim has privately categorized as Most Boring Place Ever, When Do We Leave. The most interesting thing they found was a stream of astral eddies hovering on the edge of space-subspace interfold layer, to the fascination of  _no one_  apart from a few space geeks on the science decks who Jim’s pretty sure peed themselves a little. Spock, the traitorous bastard, wrangles Jim into a conference room to “discuss the matter of emanating plasma particles left in their wake, Captain,” and Jim has to weather the enthusiasm of about twenty dewy-eyed blue shirts for the approximate duration of a glacial age.

He practically flees to medbay afterward, because if Bones doesn’t hook him up with some actual booze, Jim will be forced to resort to whatever piss-tasting concoction Scotty’s replicated down in engineering, and that just never ends well.

Also, he  _misses_ the obstinate son of a bitch.

Sickbay is stocked to bursting. When he gets there, Nurse Chapel is overseeing the medical personnel, PADD in hand, as they unload crates and crates of whatever shit Bones thought they might need for a month-long stint in Boring Why Are You So Boring Quadrant, which it turns out is pretty much everything. They wiped out the first Starfleet outpost they went to, and Jim had to delay the voyage almost a week so they could get the rest of the stuff shipped in. Command hadn’t been entirely happy, but honestly, they could go fuck themselves. They didn’t have to deal with the brunt of Bones’s truly impressive paranoia.

“Hey, is he – ”

“In his office,” Chapel says without looking up from the inventory list.

“And on a scale of – ”

“Seven,” she says breezily. “He hates inventory, and someone mislabeled the cytoglobin.”

“Noted,” Jim replies, and keys in the code to Bones’s office. Predictably, it’s been changed. Jim’s not sure why Bones even bothers at this point, punches in the override, and gapes when the computer tells him that Doctor McCoy has, in literally the last five minutes, initiated the medical bypass and categorized Jim as not being in his right mind. Jim very briefly sees overwhelming amounts of red. “ _Unfit for duty_ , are you fucking kidding me? Bones, open the door!”

It remains impassive and unyielding.

Jim really hopes Klingons are around the corner, because he really needs to shoot something.

  
He finds Spock on the bridge, corners him and waves his PADD around like if he does that hard enough, it’ll erase the offensive message from the screen. “Did you know about this?”

Spock blinks. “If you are referring to Doctor McCoy’s pronouncement as of approximately seven minutes ago – ”

“Well, I’m not referring to his perfectly dimpled ass, Spock, so yes!”

The bridge is so quiet Jim’s pretty sure you could hear a yeoman’s hair pin drop. Spock regards him with the kind of perfect serenity Jim is starting to know means he never in his life wanted to hear the words that just came out of Jim’s mouth.

“Follow me,” Spock says after a moment, and herds Jim into his office. Jim goes, still seething, and flops into a chair before deciding a split second later that no, actually, and stands so abruptly he almost knocks the chair off its legs. He paces the length of the room twice, then stops short when Spock says, in exceedingly calm tones: “The gesture was merely symbolic. It is not valid until it bears my signature, which I, of course, withheld.”

Jim waves a hand, because that is so not even the  _point_ , but the words register, and he does manage to say, “Thanks,” and mean it.

Spock inclines his head. Then, with all the solemn enthusiasm of a man at the scaffold, he says, “Your relationship with Doctor McCoy is platonic.” Which is not even the point either, but it’s closer, so Jim nods. “You are aware that this runs counter to the general consensus among the crew.”

“Yeah,” Jim says slowly.

“Have you purposely and knowingly encouraged the pretense?”

“A little,” Jim admits.

“And Doctor McCoy possessed no knowledge of this.”

Spock is speaking to Jim in tones so patient they suggest the impossible task of trying to impart information to someone with an intracranial bleed. Jim thinks that’s a bit much, but then he also doesn’t know what Spock is getting at that’s oh, so obvious, so he shakes his head.

Spock sighs. It’s almost pitying. Jim opens his mouth to ask Spock if he could for, like, one second stop getting off on being so fucking withholding and actually  _tell_  him something, and then Spock says: “Doctor McCoy is not angry, Jim. He is hurt.”

The words take a second to settle around Jim’s heart. And then they squeeze.

He finds himself sinking down into a chair and backpedaling furiously to point out that no, Jim knows this guy, he knows Bones’s anger like he knows his own, knows what it looks like in every degree and configuration, knows when it shifts to cover something else, flaring over something raw and vulnerable. And that’s when the distance hits him squarely in the chest, stunning him quietly into the realization that he hasn’t seen Bones at all, and he actually knows nothing, and Jim is a total fucking moron. Awesome. Go team.

“Spock, I need a favor,” he says.

The look in Spock’s eyes is calm and wholly free of judgment, and Jim feels it like a warm, steadying touch on his shoulder. He listens, nods his head once, and simply says, “Of course.”

  
Bones is there a few minutes later, hovering on the other side of the threshold and looking so haggard Jim actually wants to derail the mission just to go find several hundred incompetent interns for Bones to dismember until he feels better. It’s, like, an embarrassingly near thing.

“You wanted to see – oh, god _damn_  it.”

Jim gets the briefest glimpse of Bones’s expression completely shuttering before the man turns to leave, and then he’s on his feet, crossing the room in three long strides and halting at the door, telling Bones’s retreating back that: “I  _will_ chase you down these hallways, Bones. You’ve got a head start, but your endurance  _sucks_.”

Bones keeps walking, one, two, three steps, and then stops abruptly. Jim watches the rise and fall of his shoulders as he heaves a whole-hearted sigh. He makes no move otherwise, and Jim worries the inside of his cheek with his teeth, casting around for the right thing to say to get Bones to come back.

“You’re an asshole, you know,” is what comes out of his mouth in a drawl that’s half petulance. Bones twists his head so quickly it  _has_ to twinge, glares at Jim over his shoulder with a mixture of genuine vitriol and stunned disbelief, eyebrow so far up the side of his face and at such an alarming angle that he actually looks more Vulcan than human. Bingo.

“ _I’m_  an asshole?” 

Jim leans against the door and crosses his arms. “Yeah, that’s what I said.”

It’s flat and uncompromising and for a fractional, heartbeat moment, the fury in Bones’s eyes dims, overwhelmed by something sharp and wretched that tears into Jim in all the wrong ways and fills him swiftly with leaden remorse. It weighs down his ribs, makes it hard to breathe, and he opens his mouth unthinkingly to take it back, because Bones is supposed to get angry. He isn’t supposed to look at Jim like that.

And then Bones turns, and he isn’t looking at Jim at all, and that’s worse.

“Permission to be dismissed,” Bones bites out, the lines of his body as stiff as his voice. “Sir.”

“Denied,” Jim says thoughtlessly, and advances. “Bones – ”

Bones spins around completely, the look in his eyes cementing Jim’s heels to the floor. “Fine!” he shouts, two spots of vivid color high in his cheeks, and the little mid-brow dent makes an appearance, giving Jim the totally inappropriate, strangled urge to laugh. Jim poked it once and swears he saw his life flash before his eyes. “Fine, Jim, you want to talk? By all goddamn means!”

He storms past, knocking Jim’s shoulder hard with his own, into Spock’s office.

“Okay,” Jim says, stomach flipping, and follows.

The automated door slides shut, sealing them inside. There’s a pinched quality to the way Bones is holding himself that’s at odds with how this usually works, like he’s struggling to keep himself in. Normally Bones is all wild gesticulation and a touch of drawl that makes his voice sound bigger, stretches the syllables and gives them girth. Bones’s anger takes up space, fills the room and pushes up against the sides of it, demanding either a hasty retreat or, for those brave or stupid enough, a firm push back.

This is not that.

This is what Bones didn’t want Jim to see.

“I’m sorry,” Jim blurts. The words spark a series of painful collapses in his chest, leave him feeling hollowed out and cavernous. Bones looks like he’s too big for himself suddenly, like he’s retreated as far into his body as he can and somehow run out of room. Jim wants to take the excess and house it in the spaces between his ribs. “Bones. I’m sorry.”

Bones stares at him, mouth a jagged line on his face. “Do you even know what you’re apologizing for?”

The laughter bubbles up, hysterical, but gets trapped in Jim’s throat.  _Whatever I did to make you look like that,_ he wants to say in all earnestness, but at least he knows not to. He’s learning. Bones sighs, a narrow thing that snags on hooks in the air, not quite impatience. The distance between them is stubborn, a few glaring feet that make the inside of Jim’s skull buzz angrily.

“Okay.” Bones bites off the word, and the swarm of bees goes quiet.

“Okay?” Jim can’t help it, the laugh bursts out, scratching the roof of his mouth. “Worst apology ever, and you’re, like.  _Okay_?”

“I’ve heard worse from you.” There’s a frayed edge to it that spools out onto the floor, missing its mark. The words are bigger than they’re meant to be, truer in a way that makes Jim’s chest hurt. Jim grunts, frustrated, because words: what even are they, and takes two steps toward him, stopping cold when Bones edges back. It stings. “Leave it, Jim, it’s fine.”

“Bullshit it’s fine,” Jim says, a little coldly. “Look, you wanna know what I’m apologizing for, you want specifics? I don’t have them. I’m  _sorry_  – about that, and about the other thing, whichever part of it that is, I don’t – I’m not a mind reader, Bones, will you  _look_ at me or something? Jesus.”

His heart’s pounding sluggishly in his chest, and for several long moments, neither of them moves. Jim’s hand twitches with the effort it takes not to reach out and fix the stubborn angling of their bodies, Bones’s turned so resolutely away, an unforgiving perpendicular. He watches as Bones pulls his lower lip in between his teeth: it glistens faintly when it’s released, reddened like he’d bitten down hard. Bones is curled in on himself in a way he never is except in sleep, and even then Jim knows that sometimes all it takes is an ankle hooking around one of Bones’s calves for the man to murmur indecipherably and roll onto his back, hair plastered to his forehead like the cowl of sleep made manifest. It’s not uncommon, if Jim drifts off again, to wake up with Bones’s hand curled protectively around the back of his neck, thumb pressed into the fleshy junction beneath his ear.

Bones snores, and loudly. There was a time when Jim couldn’t sleep through it.

His chest feels tight.

“Fuck,” he says, letting go of the breath he’d been inadvertently holding, off balance and wide-eyed and feeling more acutely inept than he has in basically ever.

A muscle in Bones’s jaw tics, and he looks up, misinterpreting some integral aspect of Jim’s tone. His face falls, leaving him hopelessly exposed, and Jim responds impulsively, making quick work of the space separating them – fists a hand in Bones’s sleeve before the bastard can even think of moving away. Bones doesn’t, and maybe it’s a testament to how effectively caught he is, because he’s suddenly drawing himself up and filling Jim’s vision, so close Jim can’t see anything else. He meets Jim’s gaze like a challenge, mouth tight and eyes blazing, and it might have worked on anyone but him.

“It’s not a joke to you,” Jim says, fingers tightening, bracing for a violent retreat that never comes.

Bones’s eyes flash, a crack of lightning that illuminates the landscape for a single standstill moment. It singes the air, and Jim’s throat feels thick, like he’s breathing smoke.

“Bones.” It’s small, stunned, and so completely and desperately fond in the face of Bones’s raw posturing that Jim nearly buckles under it. He takes McCoy’s face in his hands, thumbs over his cheekbones, and feels the man swallow. Earnestly, Jim whispers: “You are  _so stupid_.”

“Fuck you.” Bones glares, whole-hearted and actually kind of terrifying, in defiance of the hitch in his breathing. It’s so utterly, quintessentially him that Jim kind of wants to die, the smile tearing into his face and Jim helpless to stop it. Bones shifts, dials the glare up several notches and pushes ineffectively at the center of Jim’s chest. “Jim, damn it, let go.”

“No,” Jim says, buoyant. His thumb slides down, brushing over the corner of Bones’s mouth, and Bones shudders visibly. Jim’s vision rattles, or maybe it’s his breath. The momentary giddiness turns over in his gut, showing a new face that’s faintly mocking. Soberly, Jim extends the touch to sweep over the generous swell of Bones’s bottom lip, and it’s input for output, the exhalation falling harshly from Bones’s mouth, the fingers on Jim’s chest twitching.

Bones’s eyes have gone downcast, hovering around Jim’s throat.

“Wow,” Jim says thoughtfully, his mouth a helpless curve. “There are so many elephants in this room we’re practically on safari.”

“Jim, I swear to god, if you make one more joke – ”

“Bones, I am so serious,” he says, leaning in close enough to feel McCoy’s breath against his face.

It’s the strangest thing, being on the other side of this, Bones saying  _I’m fine_ when he’s anything but, Jim seeing through it so easily he wonders why either of them even bothers. It’s counter-intuitive: Jim’s always believed in limiting his losses, but with Bones it’s always been something else. There was a moment, he thinks, when it could have gone either way, when he could have listened to the voice in his head telling him  _no fucking further_ instead of adding to the pile of things Bones does for him. Jim’s gotten pretty good at deciding when that voice is full of shit; in his experience, those are the times when it sounds most like him.

Jim uses the hand still cupping the side of Bones’s face to tilt it towards him. Bones lets him, stubborn reluctance written in the bow of his lips, and casts his eyes searchingly over Jim’s face. Jim bears it without trying to meet his gaze, thumb still poised on the edge of Bones’s mouth, close but not touching.

“You’re an asshole,” Bones says thickly and without much heat.

“Yeah.” Their foreheads are almost brushing. “But I don’t mean it.”

The next part is crucial. Jim knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that whatever lead Jim throws him, Bones will pick it up and follow. Jim figured that out right after he realized that Bones lets himself be defined by the needs of others instead of his own. The latter he buries in a place just out of reach, where they won’t tie up his hands. It’s where he’s comfortable, but it’s not what Jim wants, and maybe that’s just continuing the trend, a bizarre catch-22 carved into the spaces Jim makes that Bones fills.

“Whatever you want,” Jim says, almost a murmur. “Do it.”

A jerk in the line of McCoy’s broad shoulders, and the hand on Jim’s chest is very slightly shaking.

“Jim,” he says in a low growl, the syllable cut short by the hard clench of his fingers. “You are a font of bad ideas. Let it go.”

It sounds tight, the kind of thing a person says with their eyes closed, toes curled over a precipice. Bones’s eyes are wide open.

“Bones,” Jim says warmly. “When do I  _ever_ – ”

Suddenly there’s a hand on his waist and a fist in his shirt, and Jim hits the edge of the conference table with bruising force, breath catching on impact. For a moment his entire body tenses, instinctively bracing for a fight, but then Bones’s hands are on his thighs, pushing them apart, and it just as instinctively relaxes, becomes pliant to the touch. Jim molds himself into the shape Bones demands the same way he does after his body has taken a battering, Bones busy with the task of putting Jim back together. His stomach clenches with the certain knowledge that he’d let Bones take him apart, too. Without thinking, he’d let him.

Bones curves his hands around Jim’s hips, pulls him in close, Jim’s ass resting on the very edge of the table. His legs are bracketing Bones’s body, and he clenches them. Bones pulls in a breath.

“Jim,” he says again, and it sounds so torn and abjectly miserable that Jim’s heart jumps, settles heavily in his throat.

He brings a hand up to Bones’s face, fingers skirting gently over the apple of his cheek. The touch shifts, blunt nails dragging along jaw muscles that clench in its wake. “You’re really not supposed to sound like that,” Jim tries, surprised by the unsteadiness of his voice.

“What the hell am I supposed to sound like?”

Jim hones in on the flare of irritation like a homing beacon, so familiar and close and welcome that it practically curls his toes. Bones’s mouth is a taut, angry line on his face, there’s an edge to his gaze that’s skittish, but his grip on Jim’s hips is so tight it’s probably cutting off some circulation. Everyone has a tell: with Bones it’s his hands. The man is one incongruity after another, but his hands give him away every time. Jim tilts his hips, a fractional upward movement, lips parting at the snag it puts in Bones’s breathing.

It’s balancing on the head of a pin.

“Bones, are you hyperventilating?” Jim asks with a sudden excess of gravitas, voice dropping. “Bones, breathe. Bones – ”

“ _Un_ believable pain in my  _ass_ ,” Bones growls in a rush, then surges forward and kisses him.

It’s chaste, a firm press of lips on lips designed to shut Jim up and nothing more. It’s a new method, but the ending’s the same, and immediately Jim is smiling against Bones’s mouth, swears he feels an answering twitch in return.

A heartbeat, maybe two before it’s no longer familiar, a shift of intent made manifest by the careful movement of Bones’s mouth against his. Jim responds without thinking, easy and warm, and then Bones’s tongue flickers over Jim’s bottom lip, and Jim’s entire world narrows down to the slick, searing touch, there and all too quickly gone.

Jim’s got a hand clutched in the hem of Bones’s undershirt, breath quickening. Bones is frozen suddenly, but there’s a thrum underneath, like it’s hurting him to keep still. Jim grazes his teeth carefully against the swell of his top lip, just enough pressure toward the end to make it sting.

The exhalation sounds torn from Bones’s throat. Then, in a voice so low it drags against Jim’s nerve endings, he says: “Okay.”

The pin drops.

He kisses Jim like he’s trying to crawl inside of him through his mouth – bruising, opening him up with teeth and tongue and the strong, demanding angle of his jaw. For one brief instant it aligns every vertebra and tugs, jerking Jim straight, bringing him flush against Bones’s chest. Jim’s mind blanks, world going muted except for the blood rushing to his ears and the splintered breaths Bones is pulling through his nose. He can feel the stuttering of Bones’s heart, and it turns something over in his chest, aching.

“Okay,” Bones says again, voice edged in glass, and Jim shivers, breath knocking around in his lungs, fingers scrabbling on Bones’s elbow. The hold on his hips tightens.

He tilts his face up and kisses him, and it’s the easiest thing in the world. One of Bones’s hands comes up to clutch the side of Jim’s face. There’s a noise in there that Jim swallows: it hits every rib on the way down, catching on the last and fusing to the bone. He gives back what he gets but waits for Bones to make the next move, sucks lightly around Bones’s tongue and uses his teeth, exploiting every inch of track Bones lays down but never more than that. Bones may not know how to shape his voice around his needs worth a damn, but he can use his hands. He can take. It’s an admission, enough of one, and Jim lets everything hinge on that instead.

Doesn’t mean he can’t help it along a little.

He hooks his ankles around Bones’s calves, securing the lock of their bodies, and spares a thought for how this would feel if they were considerably less clothed, maybe with Bones inside of him. His hips jerk once, helplessly, at the idea. Bones’s mouth goes slack in response, eyes half-lidded and out of focus, lips flushed and shining.

“You’ve got a great mouth,” Jim says honestly, a touch hoarse, so close their lips brush when he speaks. “Evidence suggests you know how to use it.”

“Evidence suggests? What are you,” Bones mutters acidly, but hitches Jim in closer, widening his stance a little so it’s groin to groin, and oh shit, this is happening. It’s blessed, inadequate friction, and Jim’s eyelids droop at it, smiling in a way he knows is stupid. He can’t help it: it’s an automatic response, his brain all fired up and lazily giddy with the knowledge that  _You Are About to Get Laid, Jim Kirk_ and he’s all  _yeah, I_ know.

“Let me rephrase. From the way you just kissed me like you were trying to creatively rearrange my ribs, I’d be  _really_  interested to see what that mouth could do wrapped around my dick.”

So, fuck, that probably counts as more than ‘a little’, but Jim is full-blooded and male and human, and Bones doesn’t so much embody the word obstinate as takes it out back and schools it until it’s crying.

From the way Bones’s breath catches, though, it more than hits its mark.

“Who allowed you to happen to my life?” Bones asks, the kind of dark rhetorical Jim’s come to expect as his due, hand relinquishing its crushing grip on Jim’s hip to tear at the front of his pants. Jim bites his lip, maybe forgets to breathe, and then McCoy’s hand is on his dick, large and warm and capable, squeezing once, lightly, before stroking him from root to tip. Jim’s forehead hits Bones’s shoulder, breath stamped out of him as his eyes slide shut.

The hand on the back of Jim’s neck is gentle, steadying in counterpoint to the rough slide of Bones’s thumb. Jim mouths at the fabric of Bones’s shirt, over his pounding heart, one hand braced on the table and the other hooked into the waistband of Bones’s pants. Jim’s felt those hands on him a thousand times, but the naked intent here is staggering. His breath twists to mirror the movement of Bones’s wrist, and then there’s a mouth at his ear, hovering over the shell. Jim turns into it thoughtlessly.

“Both hands on the table,” Bones says, hot against the side of his face, and Jim almost moans. He lifts his head and blinks up at him, takes in the slight flush creeping along Bones’s neck and does as he’s told, tightening his legs around Bones to offset the distance it puts between them. “Lean back,” Bones murmurs, and jerks Jim roughly, so good it almost makes Jim’s elbows buckle.

Jim turns his head into the hand at his shoulder, nosing against the underside of Bones’s wrist. He licks at the thin skin, eyes closing at the way it makes the fingers on his cock clench, delivers wet, open-mouthed kisses and tries to suck a bruise into it even though the angle’s all wrong. McCoy’s pulse jumps against his mouth, and that in itself is almost better than the palm sliding over the slick head of his dick, trying to ease the burn of that dry grip. Bones grunts, frustrated, and Jim’s eyes snap open in time to see Bones lick a wide stripe over his palm and spit into it.

“Fuck,” Jim says, breath tripping.

Bones leans forward, hand dropping from Jim’s shoulder to lie flat on the table as his spit-wet hand encircles him. Their mouths brush, Jim’s falling open as Bones starts to stroke him in earnest, long, slow pulls that twist around the glans and make the muscles in his thighs contract.

“Knew you’d be good at this,” he says, the edges of it cracking. “Your hands, fuck.”

Bones’s pupils are blown wide. “Jim.”

It sounds shattered. Jim blinks, pushes himself up to close the distance, biting and licking at Bones’s lips until he’s moaning, a short, aborted noise that settles in Jim’s throat. He slides his hand over the table until it meets flesh, lays it over Bones’s fingers and curls his own around his wrist. Bones closes his eyes, shoulders quaking a little as though under some invisible onslaught, hand stilling. For a second he looks almost brittle. It puts hooks in Jim’s skin, makes him want to lash out at whatever caused it, but the answer’s obvious.

“Bones,” he says, soft, and kisses the underside of Bones’s jaw, half wordless apology. The silence makes him frown, encroaching and ominous, and he doesn’t so much kiss as continue to brush his mouth over Bones’s skin, a mindless, repetitive gesture that has nothing to do with memorizing the feel.

Jim’s legs relax, or start to.

“Said something about my mouth,” Bones says, and Jim’s heart rate doubles.

“It – ” He gasps at the teeth grazing against his jugular, surgically precise. “It’s a good mouth.”

“Around your dick,” Bones continues, a low rasp that lights every one of Jim’s nerve endings, singes them. He punctuates the phrase with a sharp twist of his wrist, strokes down and brushes his knuckles lightly against Jim’s balls. Jim lifts his hips, cursing, tightens his fingers around the hand not currently punching holes in his breathing. A harsh exhale against his neck, and the hand underneath Jim’s twitches. “Jesus, Jim, you can’t say shit like that.”

“What?” Jim asks, swallowing. “Mild dirty talk?” Whatever, Bones doesn’t have to be into that, he’s perfect, that hand – fuck, that hand is  _perfect_.

“No,” Bones says roughly. “The other thing.”

Jim thinks, dials it back and tries to remember, but it’s always hard to keep track of the things he says when someone’s paying special attention to his dick, mind tight and obsessed with the sheer physical sensation of it. Bones doesn’t really give him much of a chance. He’s got his hands on Jim’s waistband, tugging firmly, and Jim uses his hold on Bones’s legs for leverage, lifts his hips so Bones can slide pants and underwear down his thighs.

Then it clicks.

“Little late to pretend I’ve never thought about this, isn’t it?”

The look Bones levels him is severe. “That’s not what this is.”

It’s a challenge issued by someone who knows they’ve already lost, and it pings every single alarm bell until the inside of Jim’s head is blaring. He frowns, reaches out, but Bones is already dropping to his knees. It’s a sight he wanted to savor: instead he feels like he’s been punched in the gut. Bones slides his pants the remainder of the way down, hands resolute and steady. Jim bats at them ineffectually and gets a quelling glare for his trouble. He sees the cracks in it, genuine concern battling with just how fucking badly he wants this to continue – settles for wrapping his legs around Bones’s torso, arousal spiking at how easily Bones accommodates him, shuffling in close between the protective bracket of Jim’s thighs.

He runs a hand through Bones’s hair without thinking. It sticks up ridiculously, making something twinge in his chest, heady and for an instant excruciating.

“I have, you know,” Jim says, hollowed out and bare. 

Something in Bones’s eyes shatters, and then slowly, deliberately rearranges itself. All Jim can think, deliriously, is that it makes him look younger and older at the same time.

“Come here,” Bones says.

He slides his hands under Jim’s thighs, hooking around and settling them on Jim’s waist where he rubs small circles into the skin with his thumbs. Jim’s fingers clench in his hair, stomach muscles shuddering as Bones leans in, painfully slowly, and closes his mouth loosely over the head of Jim’s dick, warm and slick and suction-less. It puts an itch under his skin, makes his chest feel tight, and when he tilts his hips he encounters no resistance, watches his cock push past the relaxed circle of Bones’s mouth, a leisurely inch or two before Bones sucks lightly.

Jim bites the inside of his mouth, hard.

He keeps up the slow, shallow thrusts, eyes trained obsessively on Bones’s lips, the way they stretch around him and start to shine, spit gathering at the corners. His mind lazily entertains the notion of tracing the shape of it, touching the flesh boundary where Jim’s cock disappears into Bones’s mouth, a flash of imagery that makes his hips stutter and stokes the coiling heat in his gut. It’s still too little suction, not enough friction, and for some reason Jim isn’t surprised that Bones would be a mean bastard about this, slow and withholding and so fucking perfect it makes Jim want to crawl inside of him and never leave.

Bones sucks in short, intense bursts, staggers them so Jim doesn’t know when to expect it, cruelly evading any kind of rhythm. Jim’s stupid with it, with whatever Bones wants to give him, keeps pushing into that warm, unhurried mouth, fingers tight in Bones’s hair – he loosens them when he notices, pets apologetically, but that only makes Bones take him in further, changing the angle so that the head of Jim’s cock hits and drags over the roof of his mouth. It tears a guttural sound from Jim’s throat, weighs his eyelids down, and he wonders with what little higher cognitive function he has at this point if Bones is really going to bring him off just with this. The man’s hands haven’t budged from his waist.

When Jim’s dick nudges the back of Bones’s throat, he tugs Bones’s hair sharply enough to earn a low grunt.

“Sorry,” Jim breathes, a little chagrined but smiling anyway, carding his fingers gently through Bones’s hair as he bites his lip and fights the muscles in his thighs screaming at him to thrust until one of them breaks. Bones groans and swallows around him, and Jim almost yells, head bowing, fingers scrabbling against his scalp. “ _Fuck_ , Bones.”

Bones looks up at him, eyes searing with his mouth full of Jim’s cock, and Jim feels wrecked, hips pumping involuntarily, Bones’s hands steadying but doing nothing to impede. He’s overheated, sticky with it, shirt clinging to his shoulders and back, shaking with the effort of containing his thrusts. Bones gags once and breathes through it like a fucking professional, grip tightening on Jim’s hips when he tries to pull away, and fuck, there’s no way he’s going to last. Bones sucks in counterpoint to the slide of Jim’s dick, cheeks hollowing around the head and tonguing the slit right before Jim slams back home. He works Jim with the muscles of his throat on every upthrust, sure and steady like he was fucking born to do it, and Jim can’t breathe. He tries desperately to gentle the touch in Bones’s hair, shifts his hand to clutch the back of Bones’s neck, but it always edges toward violence.

Jim says his name in a stranger’s voice, a rough thing with dents in it, blunt nails digging into Bones’s skin.

That mouth pops off of him, heaves a breath against Jim’s leg. Jim can’t see straight, can’t fucking focus, cock jumping as Bones licks and bites his way along the inside of Jim’s thigh. The arm holding him up is shaking, almost buckles when Bones tongues along the crease, lips hovering near Jim’s balls, and then he’s nosing against the underside of Jim’s dick, breath hot against his perineum, and  _sucking_. Jim’s entire world goes white around the edges as he comes, barely cresting before Bones dislodges one hand from his hip to wrap it around him, mouthing impossibly against Jim’s clenching balls.

“Holy shit,” Jim says right before his arm gives out. He catches himself on his elbow as Bones works him through the trembling aftershocks, makes a torn, disbelieving noise when Bones takes him in his mouth again and catches one last pathetic string of come on his tongue, eyes closed in a way Jim’s not sure isn’t defensive. “Holy  _shit_.”

The moan might come from either of them. Jim stares down the length of his heaving chest and watches Bones pull off of him, achingly slow. 

“I think you broke my face with your dick,” Bones says, a rough, ruined scrape that does its level best to force one last sad twitch from Jim’s softening cock. He’s rubbing at his jaw, mouth hopelessly swollen and red, shiny with a slick mixture of spit and come. Jim can’t even handle this guy. He laughs incredulously and, when he thinks he can manage it for more than two seconds, pushes himself up to sitting, lowering his legs and settling each foot firmly on either side of him.

“Mind-blowing orgasms  _and_  compliments? Bones, seriously, what am I going to do with you?” he asks in a tone that very clearly suggests he knows exactly what he’s going to do with him and could provide detailed reference diagrams if necessary.

Bones’s expression goes skittish the way it does when he’s blushing, but his cheeks are so flushed already that it’s hard to tell. “Not a compliment,” he growls. “Asshole.”

“You’re cranky when you haven’t come yet,” Jim says, atrociously fond. Bones’s hair is sticking up in all sorts of horrifying directions. It puts a desperate kind of pressure in his chest that Jim’s convinced can only be assuaged by eliminating the distance between them. He grabs hold of Bones’s arm, just below the shoulder, and pulls. “Come here.”

Bones stands, shaky, sways into and looks hard at him, a jagged edge under the glaze that makes the smile wilt on Jim’s face. Jim hooks fingers into his shirt collar, tugging, still stupid with the warm buzz of a truly fantastic – if not  _mind_ -blowing, but they’ve got time – orgasm, slides off the table to prop his bare ass on the edge and licks into Bones’s unresisting mouth, chasing the taste of himself on his tongue. Bones sighs, stiff-shouldered, and curls one hand securely into the hem of Jim’s shirt.

“You know you’re stuck with me now, right?” Jim asks, sliding his mouth over Bones’s chin and worrying it with his teeth. The words are light, but his heart’s pounding, making them rattle in his ears. He has a desperate thought that Bones is going to say no, looming specters of the issues Bones punched his way through in the five years Jim’s known him: he feels cracked open suddenly and shudders with it, disguising it with a roll of his shoulders. “Not that you so weren’t before, but Bones – the things I wanna do to you.”

A small catch in Bones’s breath: it jangles against the inside of Jim’s skull. When he speaks, there’s a breathlessness underlying the deadpan that Jim could get used to. “I had a horrifying vision, but it was just my life, flashing before my eyes. I’ve unleashed a monster.”

“Yeah,” Jim says, mouth curving against the shadows at the base of Bones’s throat. “The monster of my  _dick_.”

“I hate you,” he groans. “So much.”

“ _So_  cranky.” Jim snaps open the buttons on Bones’s pants, quick and efficient, lives briefly for the broken sound Bones makes over his head when he slides his hand down and cups him, squeezing.

He closes his eyes and maps him out gently, thumbs the divot of his hip and tests the weight of his balls in his hand, rolling them. Bones grunts, slides his fingers underneath Jim’s shirt and grips the small of his back while Jim presses his face into Bones’s chest and circles his dick loosely with his fist. He doesn’t have to work him up to anything, Bones is already there, full and flushed and heavy in Jim’s hand, thick drops of pre-ejaculate glistening at the tip. His neck smells warm and human and just a little bit like antiseptic, the need in him coiled so tight Jim wants to run his hands along his sides and soothe, if only to allay the ache in his chest.

“I got you,” he says instead, mouthing against the skin below his ear as he works him in long, slow, steady jerks. Bones shudders and locks his hips like he’s holding back. His head falls to rest on Jim’s shoulder, face turning into the side of Jim’s neck. Jim imagines his eyes are firmly shut. “Bones, relax. Or don’t, but – ” He rolls his thumb over the head, digs in a little, just enough to make him buck. Jim bites his lip. “Yeah, like that. Focus here.”

“What the hell else d’you think I’m focusing on?” His voice has crags in it and a hint of drawl, and Jim inadvertently speeds up the hand on his dick, because Jesus, the ideas it puts into his brain. He may actually  _need_ diagrams for some of them. 

Jim laughs shakily, breath gusting. “You’re fighting, you stubborn asshole.”

“Fuck you, Jim,” he says tightly, and Jim sucks an angry bruise into his neck, goes over and over it with his tongue in time with the rhythm he’s setting with his hand.

“Absolutely,” Jim promises against the fresh mark on Bones’s skin, and Bones jerks his hips, muffling a sound into the curve of Jim’s shoulder. “Later. Right now. Whenever. Seriously, you might as well take the next five shifts off, because I want you spread out and naked and ready to fuck into me, Bones. And then I want to make you come for  _hours_.”

Bones makes a low sound in his throat that’s half defeat, and suddenly he’s pushing at Jim’s shoulders, knocking him onto his back so quickly Jim only narrowly avoids slamming the back of his head against the surface of the table. Bones climbs on top of him like a parched man at a well, half possessed, breaths heavy and tight. He swats Jim’s unoccupied hand away when it goes for his pants, trying to shuck them down further, grabs him by the wrist and pushes it up,  _Jesus_ , over his head, digging his thumb into Jim’s hammering pulse and raking his other hand roughly through Jim’s hair, anchoring.

When Bones kisses him, though, it’s slow, deep and thorough, steady sweeps of his tongue that take apart without taking, almost careful, like a line someone draws in the sand. It’s diametrically opposed to the desperate, staccato movements of his hips, the way he rocks into Jim’s fist like he’s being jolted each time. Jim twists his wrist and Bones falters, scrapes his teeth against Jim’s bottom lip. Their eyes meet for one charged, breathless moment before the hand in his hair tugs and Bones closes his eyes, forehead resting against Jim’s, breath hot against Jim’s mouth.

_You really didn’t think this through_ , says the voice in his head, the one that mocks. The inside of Jim’s skull feels padded in gauze, absorbing the thought and trapping it. Bones is mouthing something against the side of his face, damagingly silent, and  _No shit_. Jim leaps without looking and if he winds up in pieces, Bones is there to put them in their proper place. The tremble in Bones’s spine tells him everything that’s different about this.

It’s a dam that can’t – won’t – hold.

“Bones,” Jim murmurs, and the man’s mouth finds his thoughtlessly, as though obeying a summons. Jim licks and sucks at it without ever initiating a kiss, and Bones lets him, groaning once in protest when Jim lets go of his dick to press two slick fingers behind his balls, rubbing the skin and applying pressure. Protest dissolves into a stuttered breath against Jim’s throat, Bones pushing into it, sliding Jim’s fingers over his hole, and then he’s gasping, body jerking as he bears down and comes, dick sliding messily along the crease of Jim’s hip and thigh.

Jim is pinned. Bones is solid and everywhere, clutching with both hands, nosing into the side of Jim’s face and pressing down with his whole body – as steady a weight as ever, grounding him like ballast. But he’s shaking, too, and Jim hurts with the need to cover him. He bumps Bones’s face with his own, seeking out his mouth, and finds his brow instead. It’s warm against his lips. Jim hums against the damp skin at his hairline and feels Bones relax by degrees, starting with the slow, measured exhale against Jim’s throat and traveling outwards.

It’s a moment, a feeling Jim thinks he might want to hold on to. The thought is foreign enough in itself, though maybe not where Bones is concerned. _One more_ , Jim thinks greedily, each breath against his neck a small justification. The thumb over his wrist is moving, stroking absently over his pulse.

“Think Spock’ll be pissed our first time was in his office?” Jim asks, sotto voce. It gets exactly the response he’s aiming for, a groan punched through with a laugh and a helpless quaking of broad shoulders that brings Bones closer.

“He won’t be anything, because you are not going to tell him, Jim, you idiot,” Bones says, voice scratching at his abused throat. The jolt of sensual memory combined with Bones’s warm weight on top of him makes Jim’s heartbeat stumble.

“Yeah, because that’s the first thing I was gonna do.” Jim briefly tries to imagine that conversation, Spock’s expression growing more and more impassive with every word that comes of Jim’s mouth like a man making his peace with death. He grins. “I’m not totally sure how I feel about the fact that you think Spock and I swap, like, sex stories. First of all, I think Nyota would kill him. And me, on principle.”

“Then I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Bones, it’s going to be pretty obvious.”

McCoy pulls back and looks at him in a way that sobers Jim instantly. It’s the look of someone trying for careful neutrality and failing.

“Thought it was already obvious,” Bones says, a twist to his mouth that Jim intensely wants gone. The dismay must show on Jim’s face, because Bones looks regretful not a moment later, eyes softening, thumb resuming its slow, steady movements on the underside of Jim’s wrist like it never stopped. All he’s done is turn the knifepoint inward, the fucking martyr, aimed it at a place that looks like stone but isn’t.

“You’re a hazard,” Jim says, bumping Bones’s hip with his own. “Unto yourself.”

Bones looks at him oddly, probably because his own words sound strange in Jim’s mouth. He pulls back, taking Jim with him. A little shifting and fumbling have Jim in a position that could roughly be called sitting, legs dangling off the edge of the table with Bones in his lap, straddling his thighs, a small mess between them. Jim kisses him, and Bones grunts, surprised, grips Jim’s shoulder like he can’t decide whether he’s going to push him away or bring him closer. His mouth chooses for him, opening up to Jim with no deliberation at all.

Jim’s almost sure, but he needs to be dead certain. 

“If you don’t want – ”

“ _I_ _’m_ stupid?” Bones asks exasperatedly. The hand shifts, moves to the back of Jim’s neck, and pulls.

Jim follows.


End file.
